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The American Prospect - articles by authorenTwo Cheers for Floydhttp://www.prospect.org/article/two-cheers-floyd
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Floyd Patterson had an ego the size of a soybean, and, sandwiched between Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali in the great scheme of boxing, he needed one that small. If getting knocked out in the first round by Sonny Liston twice within a 10-month span wasn't enough, Patterson had to sit back and watch Ali, Joe Frazier, and George Foreman -- the undisputed titans of the sport in the 1960s and '70s -- peck at and then whittle away and then eventually eclipse his legacy as a fighter. </p>
<p>When he died Thursday, at age 71, finally succumbing to the one-two of Alzheimer's and prostate cancer, he had appeared on the cover of <i>Sports Illustrated</i> exactly seven times, most recently (if that's the word) as a brooding, arms-crossed, scared-looking challenger before his ill-fated 1965 bout with Ali. In his 64 years, The Greatest has graced <i>SI</i>'s cover 37 times.</p>
<p>Anyone who has seen the wonderfully satirical barbershop scene from Eddie Murphy's <i>Coming to America</i> (1988) can rightfully claim to know something about classic boxing. The four or five fixtures at the shop, almost all played by Murphy and by Arsenio Hall, argue back and forth about who was, and is, the “greatest boxer who ever lived.” You hear Joe Louis. Cassius Clay. And the white guy who – inevitably -- brings up Rocky Marciano. No Patterson, though, despite his obvious skill in the ring, his almost obsequious humility, his then-unprecedented feat of reclaiming the heavyweight title after briefly losing it to Ingemar Johansson in 1959. (Ali would match the accomplishment in 1974 and better it in 1978.)</p>
<p>Patterson was a bridge figure, like the minor-keyed third verse of any standard pop song. He was dark and brooding, and somewhat off. While not a minor boxer, he acted -- and often behaved as if he knew it -- as a mere placeholder between the pearls of Jack Johnson, Louis, and Ali on the strand of boxing history. But before boxing was a business, before Don King and all that jazz, there was Floyd Patterson, and that soybean-sized ego.</p>
<p>In <i>King of the World</i>, his short biography on Ali, <i>New Yorker</i> editor David Remnick calls Patterson the “Underground Man” and begins his discussion of him by bluntly stating, “On the morning of the [Patterson-Sonny Liston] fight, the Heavyweight Champion of the World packed a loser's suitcase. Floyd Patterson, for all his hand speed, for all the hours he put in at the gym, was the most doubt-addled titleholder in the history of the division.” Patterson would often pack a disguise in his suitcase so that, in case of defeat, he could quickly wend through the bowels of the arena to his car without being detected and, for him at least, humiliated all over again. </p>
<p>Patterson was boxing's King Edward VI, the suffering English monarch between the awe-inspiring reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. Born slight and sickly, Edward VI entered Henry VIII's England, and he was too timid to recast it in his own image. Similarly, Patterson found himself stuck as champion in a boxing world still enamored of Joe Louis, unable to create a true environment in which he would be king. That task, of course, would fall to Ali -- as it did for Queen Elizabeth -- as the title of Remnick's book can attest. </p>
<p>Still, Floyd Patterson was something. His knockout punch against Johansson in their first rematch is considered by many to be one of boxing's greatest punches; upon his meeting with President John F. Kennedy before the first Liston fight, JFK didn't joke, didn't ask, but rather implored Patterson to beat the allegedly mob-tied ex-convict from St. Louis. Patterson lost in the first and had to carry the shame of letting down not just himself, but the President and his country, in the ring. Abiding by the old adage, Patterson tried again with Liston and met an almost identical first-round pasting. Still, unsettled by the increasing commercialization and garishness of the sport (which he felt was perfectly personified by Ali), Patterson took to the ring again in 1965 to fight Ali.</p>
<p>And it was ugly. While never evoking the epic “Radical versus Establishment” frenzy that Ali's three fights with Frazier uncorked, the bout revealed much about the guts, the fibers, and filaments that each fighter had ridden to reach the peak of his profession. Patterson had been a Brooklyn hood headed for reform school until Cus D'Amato discovered him and brought him to his gym. Ali, of course, had rocketed to the top with brashness, arrogance, and a bilious attitude toward other fighters. Mark Kram, who wrote about boxing for <i>SI</i> in the 1970s, explained that Ali's pride was really self-righteous anger. “When [Ali] became champ, he accelerated the contempt that shames and humiliates, especially against those he saw as threats to his superiority and rank among blacks, particularly the much-loved Floyd Patterson and later the implacable challenge of [Joe] Frazier.” In one of his less-than-great moments, Ali “Swift-Boated” Patterson with unnecessary ridicule and vitriol, turning what should have been an easy romp into an exhibition of his own superiority. Ali, of course, was no blacker than Patterson, no more a prisoner of his skin than his opponent. Years earlier, leaders of the NAACP had called Patterson “a civil-rights man, an integrationist, a reform-minded gentleman.” Ali, of course, was a member of the Nation of Islam, a segregationist, and -- at that time, at least -- not fighting the U.S. government over the right to conscientiously object to the Vietnam War. After his conviction for draft dodging in 1967, Ali would become a hero at least to anti-establishment Americans, but at the time of -- certainly on the night of -- the Patterson fight, he was a charlatan (albeit a supremely talented charlatan), a black fighter belittling Floyd Patterson merely for being Floyd Patterson.</p>
<p>Patterson, called “Uncle Tom” by Ali for insisting on addressing the champion as “Cassius Clay,” was bullied, tormented, and mocked for 12 rounds by a vastly superior opponent. Patterson had once cradled Johansson's KO'd head as if he were horrified by the shellacking he had just subjected it to; now, he was getting upstaged and, ironically, outclassed, by the brash new champ. Exactly two years after Kennedy died, Patterson-as-fighter did, too, forever a prince in the realm of kings.</p>
<p>It's rare to find a champion unconcerned with who knows -- who thinks, even --that he's the champion. Sports would be lucky to have another Floyd Patterson.</p>
<p><i>Simon Maxwell Apter, a former </i>Prospect<i> intern, is a Spring 2006 intern at</i> The Nation.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 12 May 2006 19:42:18 +0000145425 at http://www.prospect.orgSimon ApterHastert Disasterhttp://www.prospect.org/article/hastert-disaster
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>
Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert, a 62-year-old career politician from--and Mike Myers' fans may be permitted a chuckle here--Aurora, Illinois, stands on the second rung of presidential succession, right after the veep. Should, as Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) is attempting to do, President Bush and Vice President Cheney be impeached and removed from office (a liberal lark, perhaps, but serious enough to attract the attention of <i>The Nation</i>'s Washington correspondent John Nichols, who reported on it Wednesday), Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert would become President Hastert, and America would enter the Hastert era. First Lady Laura will become First Lady Jean. Crawford will move to Yorkville, Illinois, on the Fox River.</p>
<p>For those who don't remember <i>Saturday Night Live</i>'s “Wayne's World” sketch from the early '90s, Aurora, Illinois, lies about 30 minutes west of Chicago out Interstate 88. It's a suburban community, but still far enough from the metropolis to have its own medium-sized town identity. Aurora isn't Grover's Corners by a long shot, but it, plus the extending farmland to the west that encompasses Hastert's home district, is Big Ten-rooting, flat-A pronouncing, Heartland America.</p>
<p>John Kerry won Illinois comfortably in 2004, thanks to the impenetrable Democratic fortress that is Cook County. Every county save one (Whiteside County) in Hastert's district, though, chose Bush by at least five percentage points. And the speaker himself comfortably won re-election with 74 percent of his district's votes. But that, of course, was then. As the various “Year in Review” double-issues pile up on magazine stands, the one consensus emerging from all pundits and prognosticators is that 2005 was, well, different.</p>
<p>So now?</p>
<p>Only one year later, the most recent <i>Washington Post</i>/ABC News poll reports that 53 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing. Congress, a body constructed entirely upon a metaphysical skeleton of majorities, does not enjoy a majority of support among its own constituency. The last time Congress did earn a majority approval rating from Americans was during the gung-ho “shock-and-awe”/WMD days two and a half years ago. Hastert's House is hated; calls for inquiries, indictments--a conviction, even--riddle his chamber. What's an Auroran to do?</p>
<p>Extreme deference to the executive has been Hastert's most notable feature as Speaker; to whom would he defer should he become the executive? </p>
<p>Turns out, there'd be plenty of folks to follow blindly into the fray. </p>
<p>According to Project Vote Smart, Hastert has supported the interests of the National Right to Life Committee 100 percent of the time since 1998. This figure, it should be noted, was reported to Project Vote Smart directly from the National Right to Life Committee itself. In an obvious corollary, Hastert has supported the interests of Planned Parenthood zero percent of the time in the same period. These figures were similarly reported directly to Project Vote Smart by Planned Parenthood. Most unions, including the AFL-CIO, give Hastert identical zero percent ratings for supporting their interests. In contrast, the libertarian Cato Institute gave Hastert an ace for their hole regarding trade issues. More succinctly, the <i>National Journal</i> has given Hastert a percentile score of 96 regarding his relative conservatism in the House regarding economic, defense, and foreign policy issues, and a 95 regarding social issues. </p>
<p>Now, any college senior would blush over 95th and 96th percentile scores on the LSAT or MCAT. Word, regardless of the modesty of the test-taker, would spread around campus. I've seen it happen, the sudden magisterial awe that envelops someone after a roommate or best friend has leaked his test scores to the rumor mill. [ <i>Full disclosure: My own test scores were never deemed leak-ably high by friends.</i>] Why, then, has Hastert been the subject of only three <i>New York Times</i> headlines in the last year while his counterpart in the Senate, Bill Frist, has been boldly emblazoned 46 times? Could it be, that mild-mannered J. Dennis Hastert is the fence, the infamous “third man” who's been in charge all along and will finally assume power when the front men crumble? Have we been duped, focusing our venom on George and Dick instead of 96th percentile-Denny? </p>
<p>Silently, J. Dennis Hastert is a conservative avatar. In 1998, he voted against an amendment (that eventually passed) for the National Endowment for the Arts, a tiny but ubiquitous thorn in the conservative movement's side ever since the infamous Robert Mapplethorpe brouhaha in the '80s. Would a Hastert administration jail museum curators in Guantanamo as enemy <i>social </i> combatants? In his defense of the current U.S. position in Iraq, Hastert has profligated the same pejorative “cut-and-run” euphemism once used by vilified Ohio Rep. Jean Schmidt against a “cowardly” Rep. John Murtha last month. Maybe this is the guy the right wing has wanted all along. </p>
<p>Of course, with, as every pundit in Washington has noted, three more years left in George W. Bush's term, a hypothetical President Hastert could enjoy over 30 months of raw, un-elected, power. </p>
<p>When Lyndon Johnson assumed control of the presidency on November 22, 1963, he maintained JFK's cabinet until he won the Oval Office himself in 1964. As David Halberstam reported in <i>The Best and The Brightest</i>, this ultimately led to innumerable personality and political conflicts within the administration. Should Hastert be called upon to take President Bush's job, would he leave the same cronies and yes-men hanging around the White House? Johnson certainly failed to quell Vietnam with Kennedy's men, the so-called “brain trust.” Can we expect Hastert to fare any better in Iraq with what <i>The New Republic</i> called Bush's “Hackocracy?”</p>
<p>Based on his strikes-and-gutters record with special interest groups, President Hastert could defer important decisions--just as he has as speaker--to those who support his personal views. Would the House, now grown meek as a mouse under Hastert's tenure, rebuke? It's a parallel universe, and a dark one at that. NARAL? Silenced. Forget it. And there'd better be some more Grant Wood-like hacks out there stretching canvasses.</p>
<p>If President Bush and Vice President Cheney have broken the law, they should be impeached and tried before the Senate. If they are, though, we should examine all possible outcomes, especially the one bestowing the presidential mace upon J. Dennis Hastert. </p>
<p><i>Simon Maxwell Apter, a former Prospect intern, will begin an internship with The Nation in New York this month.<br /></i></p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 05 Jan 2006 19:36:06 +0000145138 at http://www.prospect.orgSimon ApterInvisible Childrenhttp://www.prospect.org/article/invisible-children
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>A new book investigates the oft-overlooked subject of children whose parents are serving hard time. <i>TAP</i> sits down with Nell Bernstein, author of <i>All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated</i> (The New Press, 2005). Bernstein is an award-winning journalist whose stories have appeared in <i>The Washington Post, Mother Jones, salon.com, and Newsday</i>. She was a Soros Justice Media Fellow at the Open Society Institute of New York and she wrote the introduction to <i>Juvenile</i>, Joseph Rodriguez's 2004 monograph about jailed youths. She lives in Berkeley, California.</p>
<p><b>Why did you choose to investigate this topic?</b></p>
<p>I had worked with teenagers for many, many years. In college, I worked in a runaway shelter and then, after college, I worked in a group home. Then I spent nearly ten years editing a youth newspaper at Pacific News Service in California. I think I came to the topic more from an interest in family than from an interest in prison. I was working with these kids who were fighting tooth and nail, to have families, to hold onto their own families, to kind of make families out of us and each other. It was the nineties: the family values years, the '94 Republican revolution and the “Dan Quayle Was Right”-era. On the one hand, I was hearing about this lack of family values; on the other hand, I was meeting these kids who valued family tremendously but whose families were facing these pressures. Prison was a note that was struck again and again as I began to talk to them about their families and about what was missing in their lives.</p>
<p>Then I met one kid in particular, who I think really started it all for me. He was a boy named Ricky, who's in the book. I met him quite a while ago. I asked him how he had come to be in foster care, and he told me that, one day the police had come and taken his mother—he was nine years old—and left him alone with his baby brother. He and the baby were alone for two weeks. That was the moment when I realized that there was this population of kids who were invisible and who were profoundly affected by the criminal justice system but never really seen by it.</p>
<p><b>What were some of the frustrations you found while reporting on this “invisible” class of people?</b></p>
<p>First of all, these kids are everywhere. One in ten kids has a parent who is either incarcerated, on parole, or on probation, so the number of kids who've had that experience is obviously large -- but I couldn't find them. When I made my initial calls to youth-serving organizations, they just didn't know if any of their kids had in their lives. Now, the opposite is true. There's not a room I can enter and talk about this where someone doesn't tell me that it's happened to him or that it's in his family.</p>
<p><b>So, these kids are in a kind of “blind spot” as far as American society is concerned.</b></p>
<p>In two ways: For one, the institutions that comprise the criminal justice system don't ask about kids. There are exceptions to this, but that's the norm. And then organizations that are going to deal with large numbers of young people who've had this experience like schools and juvenile halls also rarely ask about parental incarceration.</p>
<p><b>How difficult was it for you to anaesthetize yourself to these emotional stories enough to be able to write from a more objective point of view? </b></p>
<p>I didn't do that, and I don't do that. I have not tried to anaesthetize myself and I have not tried to write from an objective point of view. I've tried as much as possible to write from the kids' point of view and to look at the system through their eyes. The book is a little unusual, I think, in that it has a policy agenda, as you will see in the last chapter.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I will say that talking to the kids changed me and changed my views and my politics in a lot of ways, particularly, I think, when it comes to drugs. I came into the project and left with a strong sense that our drug laws were making things worse rather than better, but I think six years ago, I might have been among those who described drug use as a victimless crime. The kids shook me out of that. They forced me to come to terms with the damage that parental addiction has wreaked in their lives. So I say I'm not objective, but it's not as if I came in with a set of preconceived notions that were immovable. </p>
<p><b>Why do you think that speaking about criminal justice in the United States is taboo? Why have Americans continued to vote for congressmen who impose mandatory minimum sentences and refuse to judges to account for mitigating circumstances?</b></p>
<p>ItR17;s so complicated. One thing I would say is that public opinion has changed in the last few years. There has been a lot of polling that has shown that people favor rehabilitation and drug treatment over long sentences, that they don't want people locked up forever. They are interested in community alternatives. That wasn't the case ten years ago, when public opinion showed a much more “lock ‘em up” mentality. I think that people are beginning to realize that prison expansion is happening at the expense of schools; illegal drug use is up despite twenty years of mandatory minimums. The politicians have not caught up. I think a lot of our crime policy is driven by anecdote. The mandatory minimum laws happened after a college basketball star—Len Bias—died [in 1986], and it was determined that he was using. </p>
<p><b>What happened to President Bush's much-heralded “compassion” in the structure of American society?</b> </p>
<p>If I had to pick the American strain that is behind a lot of our penal policy and specifically behind our capacity to not see children, even when they're waving frantically -- I think it's American individualism that's to blame. We believe in individual responsibility; as a result, we've come up with a retributive model of justice. We insist on taking people who have committed all kinds of crimes -- not just people who are dangerous -- and decided that the only response is to airlift them out of their families and communities, put them in the middle of the state, and lock them in a cell. When they act out in prison, we put them in solitary. I think that that part of individualism which is part of our culture allows us not to see peoples' connections to their families and to their communities and to not understand that when you lift millions out of their families and communities, things are going to unravel.</p>
<p><b>So it's ironic that, in its quest for individual punishment, the American system ends up stigmatizing and punishing the family of the incarcerated.</b></p>
<p>In nineteenth-century criminology, there's this pervasive idea of hereditary taint, in which a criminal class passes this taint on from one generation to the next. We'd like to think we've moved away from that, but I really don't think that we have. I received a call on a radio show asking me, “What about the victims' kids?” as if the prisoner's children had done it to the victim's children. Kids feel that. They talk about it all the time. </p>
<p><b>How can “law and order” America stomach reform many perceive of as “soft on crime?”</b></p>
<p>Every piece of research that's come out over the years, and every bit of political rhetoric agrees that kids need families. I think that if we, as an exercise, took a minute to look at each person that we sentence through his kids' eyes, and asked ourselves, “Okay, what's the problem here? Is this a problem that requires incarceration? Or is this a different problem that needs to be dealt with legally, but in a way that is a), more likely to solve it and b), not disruptive of the parent-child bond. I think if we did that, I'd say our prison population would fall by half; I don't think there would be any harm to public safety; and there might be a benefit. And we just might get a system that works. </p>
<p><i>Simon Maxwell Apter is a Prospect intern.</i></p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 22 Dec 2005 16:09:44 +0000145123 at http://www.prospect.orgSimon ApterA Soldier's Songhttp://www.prospect.org/article/soldiers-song
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Forget Michael Bay's <i>Pearl Harbor</i> from 2001. Forget Richard Fleischer's <i>Tora! Tora! Tora!</i>, an even better film about the December 7, 1941 attack, from 1970. Forget, even, <i>Fahrenheit 9/11</i>. Forget the us-versus-them schlock, the tacked-on romantic subplots flourishing amidst a backdrop of total war, the mean-spirited finger-pointing.</p>
<p>We're searching for the soul of war, here, the combat <i>alma mater</i> that emblazons itself on a soldier's body far more resonantly than does a symbol on a college sweater or high school letterman's jacket. We're searching, here, for JFK's axiomatic orphan of defeat, that crushed kid left disfigured, disheartened, and disavowed by his war experience. We're searching for that guy who actually did save asses in World War II, the guy who landed at Inchon, the guy who traded shots with the NVA across the Mekong. This is our soldier. This, as Americans, is our war. This, as Americans, is our tragedy.</p>
<p>One by one, these are our guys.</p>
<p>Listen. On December 2, 1970, a miserable and rainy night in Manhattan by all accounts, Carnegie Hall was swaying. “A lot of people write songs about wars and government—very social things,” said the performer, “but I think about young guys who were like I was when I was young. I had no more idea about any government or political things or anything. And I think about those kind of young guys now." And he sang:</p>
<blockquote><p>
"I can't write left-handed.<br /><br />Would you please write a letter to my mother.<br /><br />Tell her to tell our family lawyer.<br /><br />Try to get a deferment for my younger brother.<br /><br />Tell the Rev. Harris to pray for me, Lord.<br /><br />I ain't gonna live. I don't believe I'm gonna live to get much older."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Bill Withers put himself in the position of a soldier whom the enemy “has done shot in [the] shoulder.” It's a personal account. It's practical. After all, how does a righty write a letter when a Vietcong bullet has suddenly transformed him into a southpaw? How is the family line going to survive with another son conscripted into active duty?</p>
<p>Forget the blood, the entrails, the fibrous ligaments so clingy and prominent in modern war films. Listen to the soldier; his pleas are our own. He is the war, embodied. We relate to him. Michael Bay might show us a dangling hulk of arm to illustrate the pain of war personified by Bill Withers' soldier. Michael Moore might interview a distraught mother and juxtapose it with a fat-and-happy eggnog shot of Barbara Bush at a Crawford Christmas party.</p>
<p>In these cinematic visions, though, the techniques of the filmmakers supersede the stories of the soldiers they're trying to tell. The soldier's humanity, his humility, is suddenly snatched from him. We watch the gore of Bay, the bizarre non sequiturs of Moore, and we're shocked. We've got to end this carnage right now, we think. The shock registers on our faces, roiling our stomachs, pinging our old injuries from high school sports. The filmmakers' shock becomes our own, the war loses its unfiltered rawness, and the soldiers lose their identities.</p>
<p>And we've lost the individual tragedy that war wreaks upon each individual victim.</p>
<p>We forget about our younger brothers, upon whose shoulders the worthless fight will now fall. We fly the flag at half-staff sometimes; it's much easier than asking a personal man of god to pray for a single soldier's soul. We shock ourselves out of coherence, out of the individual stories of 2,133 Americans in uniform who have died fighting Operation: Iraqi Freedom.</p>
<p>Listen. Here is war in the words of Solomon Burke:</p>
<blockquote><p> "I'm risking my life every day<br /><br />To end this fight<br /><br />Deep down inside my soul right now<br /><br />I believe I know, I said<br /><br />I know this cause is right<br /><br />I just want you, baby<br /><br />Please keep a light<br /><br />Keep a light burning<br /><br />In the window til I<br /><br />Til I, til I, til I<br /><br />Come on home again"
</p></blockquote>
<p>Burke, a soul man who suffered under the shadow of Marvin Gaye in the 1960s, uses Withers's simple approach to his war ballad, “Leave A Light in the Window.” Burke's soldier calmly prays for his wife to hang a light outside for him, a simple request from a grim soul. Burke's soldier is focused on that lamp on the window; we assume thousands of his brothers were issuing similar pleas throughout the jungles of Southeast Asia that night.</p>
<p>We imagine a string of individual lights, a glowing premonition of Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial in Washington. In Burke's words, we see each light, each man, each name. No matter the rightness or wrongness of this war, we imagine thousands of silently individual wishes to come home. We see every man's soul bared in the window.</p>
<p>“My niece is a hooker, and my nephew's a junky, too,” shouts Stevie Wonder in “Front Line,” which, like “I Can't Write Left-Handed,” is a personal salvo fired against the personal butchery of warfare. Wonder mocks the status quo of white America, sarcastically recalling “a quote from a movie that said 'who's more a man/ Than a man with a reason that's worth dyin' for?” George C. Scott in <i>Patton</i>? John Wayne in <i>The Green Berets?</i> Wonder's veteran “up and joined the army back in 1964…. Volunteered for Vietnam where I got my leg shot off.”</p>
<p>Ironically, Wonder's soldier's quest to become more of a man, that is, to be all he can be, ends with his dismemberment. Is this legless hero more of a man? Is he a man at all?</p>
<p>Again, the war is personified in Wonder's character. The soldier becomes more than a symbol; Wonder's voice invades your ears, pipes itself into your soul. We see the homeless vagrant on the street corner; we get angry. We don't encounter thousands of forgotten veterans every day; the war pieces itself together for us man by man, memory by memory. They had this man standing on the front line.</p>
<p>Who doesn't love a good protest song? When the pot smoke cleared, who wasn't distraught—hell, pretty pissed off—after Neil Young lambasted President Nixon and his “tin soldiers” in 1970's “Ohio”? “We're finally on our own,” Young declared, and, post-RFK, post-MLK, post-Chicago '68, and post-Woodstock (and Altamont) '69, younger Americans really were on their own. My parents graduated from the University of Wisconsin—the Berkeley of the Midwest, I was told—in 1968, and they couldn't be hippies anymore.</p>
<p>Finally on their own, my father joined the Army to help pay for medical school; after contemplating a job offer from the NSA (which would have meant disavowing all of her foreign-born friends), my mother went to work for John Conyers. The seventies had come; my parents were on their own. Nixon was coming—had come, even—and there were four dead in Ohio. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young burned the White House down with “Ohio.” But the four dead? Americans needed Life Magazine for their stories. War, as the president says, is a national effort, a patriotic putsch against evil. He forgets, however, the personalities of his soldiers, the tragedies of his troops.</p>
<p>Bill Withers grew up in Slab Fork, West Virginia and served in the U.S. Navy for eight years. He, like Philadelphia's Burke and Saginaw's Wonder, knew buddies converted from friend to fodder. They tell their stories. And we should listen.</p>
<p><i>Simon Maxwell Apter is a Prospect intern.</i></p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 09 Dec 2005 18:33:34 +0000145076 at http://www.prospect.orgSimon ApterG'bye, Harriet; Hello … Janice?!http://www.prospect.org/article/gbye-harriet-hello-%E2%80%A6-janice
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>
With Michael Jordan still on the table in the 1984 NBA draft, the Portland Trail Blazers used their first-round pick on Sam Bowie, a 7-foot-1 All-American string bean from Kentucky. Bowie, a walking injury, became a punch line for generations of NBA fans, missing hundreds of games while Air Jordan slowly ascended to greatest-of-all-time status. “We needed a center,” has been the championship-less team's mantra ever since. </p>
<p>
Now, with Harriet Miers having withdrawn herself as nominee to the Supreme Court, President Bush gets what the Blazers (and their fans) have craved for more than two decades: a second chance. The obvious thing for him to do, it seems, is to find a John Roberts–esque nominee -- obviously conservative, obviously qualified, and not obviously controversial. Federal appeals court judge Michael Luttig comes to mind.</p>
<p>
But what if Bush doesn't do the obvious? There's already a sense -- indeed, it was being whispered around town before Miers officially withdrew -- that conservatives will be pushing for the president to try, try again with Janice Rogers Brown -- a hope GOP Senator George Allen of Virginia expressed to Tim Russert on <i>Meet the Press</i> this past weekend.</p>
<p>
A Bush nomination of Brown, a staunch conservative ideologue, would prove to be about as pleasant as a shot of pancreatic bile. Brown, of course, eked her way onto the court of appeals through an 11th-hour compromise negotiated by the Senate's so-called Gang of 14, which gave GOP leadership a no-filibuster guarantee for Brown and a handful of other controversial judicial nominees. </p>
<p>
A former associate justice of the California Supreme Court, Brown was confirmed to the D.C. bench by the Senate last spring in a 57-43 vote. Every Senate Democrat except one -- Nebraska's Ben Nelson -- voted against her. </p>
<p>
During the Brown nomination brouhaha, <i>The Washington Post</i> called her “one of the most unapologetically ideological nominees of either party in many years,” and Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP's Washington bureau, told <i>The Black Commentator</i> that Brown (who is black) “has a record of hostility to fundamental civil and constitutional rights principles, and she is committed to using her power as a judge to twist the law in ways that undermine those principles.” </p>
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While serving in Sacramento, Brown authored, often single-handedly, dissenting opinions -- and, according to colleagues, unprofessionally acerbic ones -- that undermined personal privacy and delivered speeches lambasting FDR's New Deal as America's “socialist revolution.” In October 2003, People For the American Way pegged Rogers as further right than both Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas and, in its report co-authored by the NAACP entitled “Loose Cannon,” issued an acronym-laden laundry list of organizations that opposed the nomination, including NARAL, NOW, the NAACP, and the AFL-CIO.</p>
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Scary job-approval numbers and looming indictments of key White House figures ensure that President Bush will face an entirely different political climate now should he proceed with a nomination of Brown to the Supreme Court than he did when he originally tapped her for the court of appeals two years ago. The climate is even radically different from when she was finally confirmed in June. The Gang of 14 agreement, hastily created in May by senators from both sides of the aisle, pledged to avoid judicial filibusters except in “extraordinary circumstances” -- a vague condition that now has Washington buzzing about what, if anything, constitutes an extraordinary circumstance. </p>
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Behind the Gang of 14's swath of recent confirmations, though, may lie the answer to what -- or more importantly <i>whom</i> -- will be seen by Democratic senators as an extraordinary circumstance these days. While Brown squeaked by with one lonely Democratic vote, fellow conservative nominee to the D.C. Circuit -- and alleged perjurer -- Thomas B. Griffith was confirmed in a 73-24 vote. Similarly, previously blocked nominees Richard A. Griffin and David W. McKeague found themselves proudly confirmed to the bench of the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati by votes of 95-0 and 96-0, respectively. And, perhaps most tellingly, John G. Roberts Jr. was confirmed as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court by a 78-22 margin; fully half of the Senate's Democrats voiced yeas for him. </p>
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With the White House on such a quake-prone foundation these days, and with a seat on the highest court at stake, Senate Democrats may become less scrupulous in their determination of which nominees are or aren't “extraordinary.” Clearly, Griffith, Griffin, et al. were not. Senate Democrats would seem to be solidly united against any ascension of Brown to the Supreme Court. While filibusters may not have been in fashion for the summer and autumn, a Bush nomination of Brown could certainly have them flying off the racks for the holidays. </p>
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Another probable leading choice is Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. He's the man Karl Rove wanted in the first place. But after Patrick Fitzgerald hands down his decision in the Plame case later today or tomorrow, Rove may suddenly become a little less influential. And, of course, we know that the right considers Gonzales soft on key issues. But Bush -- reeling from the Miers fiasco, the 2,000th death in Iraq, and likely indictments of key personnel -- may decide that he needs to name Gonzales, a Latino whom the Democrats would be unlikely to work up much opposition to.</p>
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Trail Blazers fans are still waiting for that first post-Bowie world championship; now, with incompetence clinging to all things Bush, Republicans may find themselves waiting another 20 years for a post-Miers conservative Court. </p>
<p><i>Simon Maxwell Apter is a Prospect intern.</i></p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 27 Oct 2005 19:12:32 +0000144976 at http://www.prospect.orgSimon ApterJailhouse Ruckushttp://www.prospect.org/article/jailhouse-ruckus
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>In spite of Katrina's looping right cross to New Orleans and Rita's quick left jab to Lake Charles, Louisiana's Angola Prison Rodeo -- the self-proclaimed "Wildest Show in the South" -- will be held as planned, on five successive Sundays this month at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Angola, some 135 miles northwest of New Orleans, boasts a 7,500-seat rodeo arena, a forty-year history of prison rodeos, and, now, overcrowding due to an influx of some 1,800 prisoners from flooded coastal correctional facilities.</p>
<p>Although few things in Louisiana are operating as planned this month, inmates are nevertheless participating in events like "Wild Cow Milking," "Guts and Glory," and "Convict Poker," Angola's most popular event. (Four "inmate cowboys" play poker in the center of the arena until a 2,000-pound Brahma bull is loosed into the ring; the last inmate sitting at the table wins.)</p>
<p>By nature, rodeos are violent, garish scenes, and Angola, built on a former antebellum cotton plantation on the Mississippi River, suffers from the hangover of an infamously violent and garish history. The prize-winning 1998 documentary <i>The Farm: Life Inside Angola Prison</i> reported that fully 85 percent of Angola's inmates will die within its walls, for reasons ranging from inmate vengeance to guard violence to centuries-long sentences. </p>
<p>Some are criticizing the prison for promoting the rodeo as if Katrina and Rita hadn't struck the state. "It doesn't surprise me," says Scott Fleming, an Oakland attorney who represents two Angola prisoners, after hearing that the rodeo will proceed as scheduled. "It reinforces the tradition that prisoners are there to serve their masters. It's part of [Louisiana's] refusal to treat them as human beings." Even the name "Angola" is an explicit reference to the African nation from which the slave ancestors of the prison's predominantly black population were taken hundreds of years ago. </p>
<p>The beleaguered state of Louisiana can hardly afford to waste resources on a prison rodeo, argues the Prison Activist Resource Center's Aaron Schuman. "A better use of the prison administration's time would be clarifying the story that guards left inmates to die at Orleans Parish Prison, with over 500 prisoners still unaccounted for," Schuman says. A Human Rights Watch report documented the abandonment of hundreds of prisoners at that facility in New Orleans, 517 of whom were still unaccounted for as of September 29 -- a month after Katrina flooded the jail and three days before the first rodeo event.</p>
<p>One rodeo-friendly prison warden was amazed by Angola's determination. "I'm surprised they're still having it in Louisiana," says Jim Willett, retired warden of the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville, who, during his tenure, presided over Huntsville's own prison rodeo until it was canceled in 1986.</p>
<p>But Christine Corcos, professor at the Paul M. Hebert Law Center at Louisiana State University, suggests that the Angola Prison Rodeo is more than just a wild spectacle, especially in the wake of the two hurricanes. The rodeo, she says, may be a "rite of passage" for grieving Louisianans looking to restore a sense of normalcy to their lives, just as the New Orleans Saints provided a symbol to rally around. The rodeo, she says, can provide this for both inmates and onlookers; fans have flocked to the prison from all over the Mississippi Delta region every October since 1965. The rodeo also allows inmates to invite the general population inside Angola's walls, to proudly showcase their talents in a public, albeit artificial, setting. For prisoners trapped in a less-than-desirable place, says Corcos, the rodeo offers inmates a stage on which they can reconcile their own post-hurricane grief.</p>
<p>Despite the prison's gusto, other public officials close to the event have been less brazenly enthusiastic about it. Cathy Fontenot, Angola's assistant warden and spokesperson, would not return repeated calls made to her office requesting a comment about the propriety of the rodeo's timing. And Michael Diresto, press secretary for Representative Richard Baker, whose district contains Angola, said that the congressman has no official statement about the rodeo; he also said he wasn't sure the 10-term Republican had ever attended.</p>
<p>But the show goes on. Indeed, the "Wildest Show in the South" drew thousands of fans, each paying $10 a head, to its first event on October 2. Angola and the rest of the state prison system, meanwhile, are still reeling from the problems wrought by the hurricanes. At one point, Angola's population of 5,100 inmates was swollen by another 1,800. The prison held women for the first time since 1961; some men had to sleep on the floor of the prison farm's hobby shop in order to make room for them. Memoranda from the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections show that jails and prisons all over the state are still struggling to house, transport, and even adequately document the arrestees and inmates in their charge. For Warden Burl Cain, the rodeo outweighs such concerns. "This," he told the Baton Rouge <i>Advocate</i> during the rodeo's opening Sunday, "is the first normal day we have had since Katrina." </p>
<p><i>Simon Maxwell Apter is a Prospect intern.</i></p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 19 Oct 2005 14:17:22 +0000144931 at http://www.prospect.orgSimon Apter